iPod Thefts and Newspaper Citations - Technology Evangelist

The Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper ran a story on the front page of startribune.com with the following headline and excerpt:

Robber steals student's iPod

"An armed robber stole an iPod from an Asian-languages and literature senior from the University of Minnesota a week ago, the Minnesota Daily is reporting."

Which made me wonder: Is a stolen iPod news worthy of a front page story? And what's with the "Asian-languages and literature" mention? How does the victim's major make any difference.

So I clicked.

Paragraph two:

"The robber was likely in for a surprise: Everything in the iPod was in Japanese, the student, Jasmine Egli, told the newspaper."

Oooooh. So that's the catch. Boy, is that robber going to be in for a surprise. Whatever will they do with an iPod full of content they almost certainly don't want. That's worth about as much as an iPod without any songs on it.

It's a fun local story based on the police blotter from the University of Minnesota. Nothing wrong with that.

My gripe has to do with the first two links in this blog post. Notice how I linked to the article on the Star Tribune AND to the Minnesota Daily? In my opinion, this provides value to you, my reader, by making it easy for you to read more about this story if it interest you. The Star Tribune cites the MN Daily as the source of the story but didn't link back to their source.

I see a trend evolving where news junkies read commentary on news stories FIRST, then go back to the original source if they're looking for more about the story. It's a more consumer friendly way to digest the news since you can easily find more information on stories that interest you. However, that doesn't have to be the end result.

One of the first newspaper sites to understand this trend and try to reverse it is the Washington Post, who added a "Who's Blogging" feature that provides links to commentary from the blogosphere alongside the original news stories. This show comes from a story today by Howard Kurtz about Tim Russert testifying at Scooter Libby's trial:

Washington Post Blogging References

I believe tools like this make the Washington Post more valuable news source.

The level of interest in news stories will vary from scanning of a headline to wanting to read every word that's been written on the subject. And that interest varies from reader to reader and story to story. Newspapers that enable a full spectrum of depth options (aka. links) serve their readers best.

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